Tag Archives: words

Five years ago (February 2009), I took a photo of two geese on a frozen pond, standing in identical poses. They were both balanced on only one leg, with their heads turned back over their left shoulders. The one-leg thing was presumably to keep the other, uplifted foot off the ice. Their heads may also have been turned in a heat-conserving tuck, but I suspect that it was synchronized preening. After all, the Vancouver Winter Olympics were only a year away, and the Geese were Canadian.

A week ago today, one of the people I follow on Twitter — Tom McLaughlan (@daruma) — caught my eye with these 76 characters, quoting someone else to be mentioned below: “I wonder how many writers get together to compare the pencils they use…?”

I should say, as only a bit of an aside, that the aforementioned Mr. McLaughlan is a superb photographer. You can see his “ministracts,” a concatenation of “minimalism” and “abstraction” of his own coinage, on his his website of that name and as daruma* on Flickr, which is where I first found his work several years ago. If you have glanced at the first two bullets on my About page, you will understand why his user name and his “wallgazing” set, respectively, got my attention.

[This was originally posted on August 27, 2011, but had to be “reconstructed” following the crash of a MySQL server at my Web hosting service.]

As hurricane Irene is crawling up the East Coast of the United States, it seems unfair — not to say cruel — to take advantage of someone else’s gullibility. Especially when that person’s focus is sincere concern for another person who is living on Block Island in Irene’s projected path. For the sake of anonymity, let’s call that first, caring person “L”; and the second, the focus of the concern, “A.”